I’m continuing to work my way through the Prydain books, which are a sort of comfort reading with their telling of what’s a now-familiar sort of tale.
The Castle of Llyr was problematic for me, though, although not in exactly the way I expected. It claims to be the story of Eilonwy being sent away to learn how to be a lady/princess, so I was worried it would be a “tame the spirited girl” narrative.
It hadn’t occurred to me that instead the spirited girl would hardly be in her own story at all.
*** spoilers ahead — though I’m guessing most of you have already read these books ***
Eilonwy is a rescue object for much of this book, and so absent. She’s in danger from the start, and for reasons that never become clear, Gwydion chooses to keep this danger from her, and convinces Taran to do the same. She’s kidnapped, and the otherwise all-male cast spends the book rescuing her. And when they find her, she’s under an enchantment, so still without agency.
To her credit, in the end, with the help of her “bauble,” Eilonwy breaks her own enchantment and destroys the magic that the story’s villain wanted to control. That she gives up her chance own (chance at an) enchantress’ power to do so would be problematic, but Taran actually had to do something similar, in the previous book, which helps a little.
Also to her credit, at the story’s end Eilonwy has decided that if she has to be a lady, she’s going to ace that thing, the sooner the better, so that she can get back to being who she really is and return to her real home. She’s not a tamed princess at the end.
And yet … I get the impression she’ll be absent from the next book, as Taran goes wandering to find out who he really is, and I’m wary of what she’ll be like and what agency she’ll have when she’s returned to us in the final presumably let’s-save-the-world-for-good volume. Especially since when, at the book’s end, a battle horn washes up at Eilonwy’s feet, from her ancestral home, and she takes it–and gifts it to Taran.
Taran is clearly destined for a great destiny (though it’d be delightful to see this undermined or even just played with/explored–the author is already clearly wary of power for its own sake). At the close of The Castle of Llyr, I wonder what Eilonwy is destined for, besides becoming Taran’s wife.
In a way, it feels like the pattern that gets played out decades later with Hermione Granger and Harry Potter: Hermione is clearly the better of them, but Harry is the destined hero, and in the end nothing can change that. But I’m prepared to be pleasantly surprised if things turn out otherwise.
Especially since, while Taran had to give up his object of power entirely, in The Black Cauldron, at the end of The Castle of Llyr Eilonwy’s bauble drops from Kaw’s claws into Eilonwy’s hands, like a gift of its own–though whether consolation prize or some remnant of her agency and power, I’m still waiting to see.
Finally finished the first Prydain book (Book of Three) today. There are some books that you don’t get around to reading long past when everyone else does, and you don’t really know why.
I was in just the right mood for this sort of immersive otherworld adventure, and I enjoyed it lots and lots, in spite of a few reservations: that Taran is a bit of a twit (but he’s supposed to be), that several characters are built largely around a single conversational tic or two (“munchings and crunchings” are fine and even lovely, “a Fflam always” was beginning to push it), and most of all the fear that as likable a female character as Eilonwy is likely to get tamed in later books rather than being allowed the spirited adventure-seeking life she deserved (Gwydion went down many notches in my regard when he began simultaneously flirting with and dismissing her).
But that’s not the real reason for this post. The real reason is a conversation lnhammer, who’d been rightfully telling me I needed to read these books for years.
Me: “I already knew Taran was an assistant pig-keeper. But I didn’t know the pig was important.”
lnhammer (looking up): “Some pig.”
Thanks to everyone who entered to win Absent and Plague in the Mirror. The winners of my ARCs, chosen with great care by random.org, are …
(drumroll as I pull up the website and draw virtual names)
Absent: J.R. Goldberg!
Plague in the Mirror: John Higginbotham!
Email me your addresses at janni(at)simner(dot)com and I’ll get your ARCs in the mail!
And hopefully the rest of you will seek out these terrific books once they’re out, too. 🙂 You can find out more about both Plague in the Mirror and Absent at my original post, here.
So if you’re here, you probably at least know about the Bones of Faerie trilogy. But maybe you have friends who don’t. So point them towards this goodreads giveaway of the first book in the trilogy.
Meanwhile, for the rest of you, I’m giving away ARCs of a couple books I loved that you maybe haven’t heard of, because they’re not out yet. They’re both about hauntings, of very different sorts, and have stayed with me in different ways.
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In Deborah Noyes’ Plague in the Mirror, May is haunted by Cristofana, a ghostly double from plague-era Florence who’s determined to convince May to change places with her. While on the surface this would seem a clear thanks-but-no-thanks offer, the past is seductive, Cristofana is determined, and the present has problems of its own.
This is a dark, lush, moody book that I loved enough to blurb: “Dreamy and gorgeous and dark. I couldn’t pull away from this tale of seduction–not by a lover, but by a dark past and a darker reflection of the storyteller’s own self.”
In Katie Williams’ Absent, protagonist Paige is the ghost, victim of a fall from the roof during physics class, haunting her high school along with two other students: Brooke, who died of an overdose a few months before Paige; and Evan who died decades before, but who like the others can’t seem to leave the spot of his death.
Many of Paige’s friends/enemies are convinced she jumped off that roof on purpose, but Paige … remembers things differently. Then Paige realizes she can possess living people when they think of her, and thinks maybe she has a chance to set the record straight.
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To be entered into a giveaway for Plague in the Mirror or Absent, just comment (on the wordpress version of this post) and let me know whether you’re interested in just one of the books or either of them. Closes March 20 at 5 p.m. mountain standard time.
Where Star of Danger was less interesting than I remembered, The Winds of Darkover was more interesting–and not only because I’d completely forgotten everything about it until I began rereading, at which point just enough came back to make clear that I’d read it before.
This is the first book where we get a female POV character, Melitta of Storn Castle. Melitta’s mountain home has been invaded by the bandit Brynat. Her older brother, Storn of Storn, has escaped into a telepathic trance; her younger brother is imprisoned; and her sister has been forcibly taken as Brynat’s wife. That means it falls to Melitta to escape the castle and seek help, guided by telepathic messages from her older brother.
Melitta is pretty much a standard issue Spunky Female Character, but given that we haven’t seen many spunky female characters in the earlier books (Dio Ridenow comes closest), she and her strong will to action were welcome.
Again, some PG-13 content about sex and its politics on Darkover ahead
Star of Danger was written right after The Bloody Sun, but I read it much later. I remembered, when I did, thinking that for an early Darkover book, this was one of the better ones. What it set out to do, it did just fine. I recalled a straightforward and competent adventure story, an enjoyable read that did what it set out to do well.
I still think all of that is true, yet I actually found Star of Danger less compelling this time around. It’s a better written book than the ones before it, but also somehow a less interesting one: it doesn’t fail in the ways the earlier books do, but in part that’s because it doesn’t reach as high. It’s not a deeply ambitious book, and so it succeeds.
Larry Montray, a Terran teen living on Darkover with his father, longs to see the planet beyond the spaceport. He meets Kennard (who readers aready know as Lew Alton’s father and Jeff Kerwin’s mentor) when Kennard is still a teen. Danger and adventure ensues, and along the way Larry discovers his half-Darkovan heritage.
The gender issues in Star of Danger are minimal, mostly because it’s set in the sort of SF world where women just don’t exist, Larry’s mother having conveniently died in childhood and Kennard apparently having no female kin worth mentioning. There are a few problematic references: women are incapable of defending their homes and always get sent away with the children in times of danger; being expected to go anywhere with the women, or being told one is like the women, is a huge insult; and so on. (I can’t remember now if it’s this book or The Bloody Sun where it’s also explained that there are few women in the spaceport because married men don’t tend to be in the service–there being, apparently, no women who have careers of their own in the far future.) But that’s it. Mostly the most offensive thing Star of Danger does to its female characters is to ignore them. After the first three books, this is almost a relief.
Meanwhile, rereading Star of Danger clarified for me one of the things the Darkover series does very well, which I now see it did well from the very start: depict the tension between Terra (aka Earth) and Darkover in balanced and realistic ways. I’d been trying, only half realizing it, to figure out throughout my reading which culture MZB favored: Darkover with its determination to hang on to its traditional ways, or Terra, with its interest in Progress. I was instinctively trying to work out whether the Darkovans or Terrans were the “good guys.”
But even in these early books, it’s not that simple. The Darkovans are right about some things, and the Terrans are right about others, and that tension is fundamental to the stories. In Star of Danger, it’s the whole point: Both Larry and Kennard are entrenched in the attitudes of their own people; yet also intrigued by the other, alien-to-them culture they encounter; and ultimately it takes skills drawn from both worlds for the boys to survive.
That tension of two worlds in conflict, both flawed, both valued, will continue (if I remember the books at all well) to inform the entire series, and to give it life.
ETA: This is a reread of the original, 1964 edition of The Bloody Sun, which is the one I read first, not knowing a later edition was already available. I’m also planning to reread the 70s rewrite when I come to it in the chronology. Realized last night I forgot to clarify!
This isn’t the first Darkover book I ever read. It’s the second.
The first was Darkover Landfall, handed to me by a friend who’d been trying to get me to read Darkover for ages. When she asked what I thought of it afterwards, I must have told her the truth, because she shoved the Bloody Sun at me and said something like, “Really I should have given you this one first! It’s better! I only gave you the other one because it takes place first!” (Chronologically–Darkover Landfall was actually written later.)
So I gave Darkover one more try, and if The Bloody Sun wasn’t my first Darkover book, it was the book that hooked me on the series. From its second person prologue (“This is the way it was. You were an orphan of space. For all you knew, you might have been born on one of the Big Ships …”) I was thoroughly pulled into this world.
I continued to be pulled in every time I reread the book, and I was pulled in this time, too. I was struck as I read on past the prologue by how real Darkover feels in this book. Bradley gives a level of sensory detail that wasn’t in The Planet Savers or The Sword of Aldones, and she integrates those details into the narrative more smoothly, too. I can feel, hear, and smell Darkover in this book. I’m there.
I can also see why this was the sort of story that teen me loved. Jeff Kerwin, a loner born on Darkover (not on one of the big ships after all) but shipped off to Terra when he was 12, finds his way back to his birth planet, discovers his roots and his family, and finds a place where for the first time in his life he truly belongs, all with an appropriate amount of danger and angst along the way. It’s a classic sort of story, and there are reasons for that.
PG-13 content about sex and its politics on Darkover ahead
From the very first sentence (“We were outstripping the night”), this is a stronger book than The Planet Savers.The Sword of Aldones is the story of Lew Alton, who’s returning to Darkover, the world of his birth, which he fled some years earlier–and there’s already tension in that. Lew is the child of two worlds, Terra and Darkover, and the friction between them–which informs most of the Darkover books–feels much more vivid here than in The Planet Savers, which is maybe part of why this book, for all its flaws, feels like a real Darkover book. And while I never cared about Jay Allison, I cared about Lew from the moment I met him, with his angsty past and the Dark Backstory he was clearly fleeing.
Although, when three chapters later I was still meeting piece after piece of that Dark Backstory, waiting for the real story to begin, I maybe cared a little less. Continue reading “Darkover reread: The Sword of Aldones”→
I’ve started rereading of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books, in chronological order (the order they were written, not the order in which they take place, which would be a different but also-interesting exercise).
That meant I started with The Planet Savers, written in the late 50s. I could say that this is the worst Darkover book ever written, but I’m not sure that’s really true.
I’m not sure this is really a Darkover book.
This book was written in the 50s, first appeared in Amazing Stories, and the edition that was published there is available via project Gutenberg. Which is how I know the editor of the magazine dubbed this story MZB’s “triumphant return” to the magazine, and her best story yet.
What I remember from my first read (when I think this was one of the last Darkover books I read, after having already inhaled everything else I could find) was that I hated the prose and the story in equal part, but took heart from the fact that the author over a couple decades, got from this book to some books I genuinely loved, because that gave me hope my early writing would turn into something more, too. (My first story sale was to a Darkover anthology, so Darkover has always been a little tied up in my own journey as a writer.)
The story–it’s more of a novella or novelette than novel–is about Jay Allison, a Terran physician working on Darkover who, because he spent his childhood among the planet’s tree-dwelling trailmen, who incubate a mild form of a virus that turns deadly among humans, is the planet’s only hope for mounting an expedition to convince the trailmen to come back to Terran HQ where they can donate their blood so Allison can develop a vaccine.
The problem is, Jay Allison has grown up into an arrogant jerk who hates all Darkovans and can’t possibly lead an expedition of them into the mountains where the trailmen are. So the obvious solution is … to bring out his repressed, nicer, younger, more impulsive personality, and let it go on the mission for him!
(Angst ensues!)
Read over the past year, with intermittent comments.
A few that especially rocked my world: Inside Out and Back Again, Breadcrumbs, Bitterblue, Code Name Verity, The Animal Dialogues, Vessel, and Plague in the Mirror. (But that doesn’t mean there weren’t many others on this list that I loved as well, of course.)
Continue reading “2012 in books”→
